Posted on 10/28/2020 9:32:42 AM PDT by rktman
During last Thursday's debate, Joe Biden said his goal as president would be to "transition away from the oil industry." He has also said the future is in cars powered by electricity. Biden would build 500,000 charging stations across the country. It wasn't the first time he attacked the oil and job-producing industry in his worship of the cult of "climate change."
According to Energy Information Administration data, petroleum is America's No. 1 source of energy, providing approximately 40 percent of the nation's power needs. Biden claims oil is also a major pollutant. According to the website IQ Air, the United States ranks 87th out of 98 on a list of the "world's most polluted countries." We have done well in reducing pollutants without the overreaching arm of government forcing us into electric cars. We are also now energy independent.
It is wise - even fun - to recall past predictions, which were sold at the time as certainties, but were wrong and, fortunately, not embraced by the public. As CNN.com notes, "According to various experts, scientists and futurologists, we would have landed on Pluto and robots should be doing our laundry by now. Oh, and we'd all be living to 150." Nanobots and ape chauffeurs were also predictions that were said to be the norm by this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
SOLYNDRA, SOLYNDRA,......
I want nuclear power. LOTS of nuclear power.
Then, and only then, electric cars might make sense.
Chaching chaching!
Oil is probably a finite resource. I’d say we have 75-100 years to get fusion power and real sustainability. And some oil will always be needed for chemicals and plastics unless we have so much fusion power that we can simply make them from thin air economically. That is also way off.
Why worry about any of this at all? Don’t we have only 11 years left anyway?
According to the website IQ Air, the United States ranks 87th out of 98 on a list of the "world's most polluted countries." We have done well in reducing pollutants without the overreaching arm of government forcing us into electric cars. We are also now energy independent.
No need for fusion which will take decades to breakeven if ever. Man has already mastered the atom. Fission can power humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. Even without fast fission breed reactors, fuel reprocessing, and or particle accelerator driven breed/burn reactors. The amounts of uranium in the oceans is so best we can use the once through and bury the wastes for as long as humanity exists. Even without waste partitioning or MOX fuel reprocessing the volumes of wastes are so dense for $150 a kg you can put as much as you will ever make in shale, granite or basalts below 1000 meters. At typical burnups of 45 gigawatt days per metric ton of fuel even $500kg uranium costs under 4 tenths of a US cent per kilowatt hour in fuel costs. Disposal is already payed for with a tenth of a cent charge to the US government. $150 kg is 150,000 a ton in waste costs, at 45GWd/mtU that’s 1.08E9 kilowatt hours worth over 20 million dollars per ton of fuel in power sales at the basebar cheap rate of $20 per megawatt hour. Typical power sales rate for wholesale via ERCOT are $50_80 megawatt hour peak rates into the $150s lately. Wastes is a political problem not costs nor technical both favor direct geologic disposal. When you can make 20+ million in revenue off a 150,000 cost it makes deep sense to reprocess at $1000 kg in heavy metals to partition wastes and recover MOX fuels.
https://newatlas.com/nuclear-uranium-seawater-fibers/55033/
“So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power”
Thear are the kind of wells I still 5 rigs at a time off megapads. Shale is perfect to lock up wastes in. It’s impermeable, geologically stable and chemically inert.
I’m a petroleum geologist. Including bitumen,tar sands, heavy oil think Venezuela, shale oil not oil shale, and all conventional oils the planet has about 160 years left at 2018 levels of consumption. Add in oil shale and you add another 20_50 years but the EROI of oil shale can be negative and the emissions from retorting or in situ combustion have to be considered. I’m not talking co2 but real pollutants of SOx,NOx and all the heavy metals in the tailings, ash piles and stack exhaust as particulates. Oil shale is dirty business. Even if you retort in situ the ash is now exposed underground without containment if there is no cap shale layer water can and will leach the metals into the overlying strata and eventually communicate with groundwater. Oil shale is a bad idea. Most tar sands are as well from a in ground contamination view point. Shale oil is relatively safe as long as full containment of the drill string is maintained with triple redundant cement casings. Micro seismic shows fracs almost never extend vertically more than a few hundred meters and when you are targeting shale 2000+ meters down the risk of communication to ground water is near zero.
I can buy a Tesla Model 3 LR for $45,000 which is on pat with the S60 Volvo I already own in size and Luxury. I have contract solar panels on my roof that I get 3 cent per kilowatt hour for the next 20 years all I can use via a power concession for leasing my real estate from me. The model 3 will go 4 miles per kilowatt hour in gross charge from the charger. There is 34.4 kilowatt hours in higher heating value in a gallon of octane less in a gallon of Ethanol 10% that is mandated in Texas. At 3 cents per kilowatt hour on a kWh to kWh basis is equivalent to $1.02 gallon gasoline. 34.4*$0.03=1.02
That doesn’t factor in that electric motors are three times more efficient in using that HHV in kWh. 4 miles to the kilowatt is 100 mpge my S60 at best gets 30 mpg highway one third as much.
In cost per mile the real metric
$2.50 gal E10 prepandemic avg which will return as demand comes back.
$2.50 / 30mpg = $0.0833 per mile in just fuel
Vs
$0.03 per kWh / 4 MiKWh = $0.0075
An order of magnitude less, remember the vehicles retailed for nearly identical amounts I actually paid more for the S60 new than a Tesla would cost me today. The Tesla needs no oil changes, spark plugs, or filters and it’s battery has an 8 year unlimited mileage warranty. I have never owned a vehicle longer than 5 years so battery life is irrelevant to me.
The EU uses a different metric for fuel economy. Cost per 100 Km traveled let’s convert that to Merican.
100 miles / 30 mpg * $2.50 gal = $8.33
100 miles / 4 MiKwh * $0.03 kWh = $0.75
Let’s up the cost of electricity to what I used to pay in Texas deregulated power market. I used to contract 12 months at a time with an average of $0.11 kWh
100 Mi / 4 * $.11 = $2.75
What price of electricity equals $2.50 a gallon in E10 ?
$.0334 per kWh
100/30*0.33= $8.33
No where in the USA is the retail power rate $0.33 kWh
Again remember the cost buy the EV is already less than what I paid for my existing comparable luxury vehicle.
My next vehicle will be a Tesla and I’m a petroleum geologist that says something about how far th technology has come. Tha new model 3 will have a million mile battery pack life the current packs are 300_500 thousand mile packs and some commercial model S have already exceeded 300k
Fusion looks to be an expensive dead end, and fission has a terrible accident record. The total cost of ownership for running a nuclear plant is ridiculous. What's really needed is technology to bring down the cost of antimatter, or technology to use smaller amounts of it to disassemble atoms. Using antimatter is much more efficient and doesn't require blasting high energy neutrons everywhere.
The reason the capital cost is so high in the USA for nuclear is due to environmentalits and their endless law suits. The Koreans build new PWR and HWR for capital costs on par with natural gas combined cycle plants but with a fuel cost one tenth as much. Korea has to import all of its energy like Japan. China also has built CANDU and AP1100 reactors on time and on budget why? Neither country tolerates frivolous lawsuits nor criminal boondoggles in construction contractors.
As for accidents you cannot even compare a failed weapons production reactors built with out containment for PU239 production the electricity was just a by product of Chernobyl. Three mile Island released no lasting radiation and it’s containment functioned as designed. Fukashima was a 1960s design operated well after it should have been replaced experiencing a once in a century beyond design point failure chain compounded by human negligence not error tepco was criminally negligent by not pumping seawater immediately into the units. If they would have done that and they had the pumps in hand to do so no melt down but it also would have decommissioned the plants. They thought they could save the income they were unwilling to sacrifice the cores upfront again criminal and once a century. Modern Fen3 reactors cannot fail in the way Chernobyl, nor TMI nor FK Dashi. All of the Gen3&4 are walk away safe format least 72 hours and most have indefinite decay cooling chains so what happened in FK nor TMI can happen again. Antimatter is more of a pipe dream than fusion. Fission works today it’s by FAR the safest energy source on the planet when looking at megawatts produced vs fatalities and medical casualties per 100,000 people. Coal releases 100 times the radiation to the environment than nuclear power every single coal plant does. No dry storage cask has ever failed not a single one. They are so strong you could crash a full fueled 747 into one and let it burn out. Oh btw they did exactly that test on one used a rocket sled to crash into one then burned it for 4 hours till the jet fuel can out. Didn’t even crack it. Crash one head on into a speed locomotive yup did that too. Dropped off a bridge onto rocks yeah been there done that. Waste is a political problem period full stop. Geologists can point to hundreds of places that have 1000 meters of impervious cover and geologically stable basement formations that have been in place BILLONS of years. Wastee that’s unprocessed only needs a million year isolation, processed wastes needs 10,000 years. Both a a blink in geologic time.
Your posts have high signal-to-noise and your writing efforts are much appreciated. Posters like you hearken back to Free Republic’s good old days.
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